Access live events conference

Brandon Kazen-Maddox is a Grandchild of Deaf Adults (GODA) and third-generation native signer of American Sign Language (ASL) who identifies as a Nonbinary, Black Indigenous Person of Color and a proud member of the LGBTQAI+ community. Brandon is an artist, choreographer, director, actor, acrobat, activist and ASL artist, interpreter and performer. Brandon creates work with and for the Deaf and Disability communities, and highlights and empowers BIPOC and LGBTQAI+ artist, by building bridges of collaboration and community among people of all backgrounds and abilities. In May 2019, Brandon graduated from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts with an MFA in Dance and New Technology. In the summer of 2020, Brandon co-founded Up Until Now Collective, an arts and media company that focuses on developing and producing radically inclusive inter-disciplinary work. Up Until Now projects include SOUL(SIGNS): An ASL Playlist (a series of 10 ASL music videos for Broadstream Media, featuring iconic songs by Black women; featured in The New York Times, on ABC World News, and as the “Midnight Moment” in Times Square, appearing on 80+ screens every night at midnight in July, 2021); SOUL(SIGNS): OPERA, a series of Opera ASL videos commissioned by Boston Lyric Opera, and Pride video campaigns for Amazon Music and Global Citizen. Throughout 2021 and 2022, Brandon served as the lead consultant for providing ASL Services at The Shed, Little Island, Lincoln Center and the Park Avenue Armory, where they are bringing Deaf Directors of ASL into the inner workings of arts organizations and integrating both the Deaf perspective and Deaf performers onstage, on camera and behind the scenes. Brandon's work as an interpreter and activist has been profiled on CNN and they have appeared as a co-star on “The Good Fight" (Paramount +) and “High Maintenance” (HBO). Brandon was also a featured story-teller on the 100th episode of "Stories From The Stage" (PBS) and they were chosen as one of Gucci and Time For Change’s “22 for ‘22: Visions For a Feminist Future.” Brandon is the recipient of the New England Foundation for the Arts (NEFA) National Dance Production Grant and an awardee of the 2022 cycle of the Creative Capital Award for the ASL Dance Theatre Reimagining of Andrew Lippa’s The Wild Party. You can find more information about Brandon at www.brandonkazen-maddox.com , www.upuntilnowcollective.com or contact them at bkm296@nyu.edu.

Liz Jackson is a Founding Member of The Disabled List, a disability-led critical design collective that advocates for structural changes to what design is, how it operates, and what problems it seeks to solve. She is currently focused on analyzing power differentials that are embedded in corporate disability initiatives: primarily through how brand partnerships with large scale disability charities serve to undermine and neutralize the work of disabled employees and independent activists. Through this process, Liz works to shift the focus from those who wield power to those who can be entrusted to harness it.

Who am I hoping to impress?

Accommodations don’t just make events accessible, they also perform accessibility. It is important to consider whether the audience for your event is actually different from the audience for your performance of accessibility. This is why it is important to begin any accessibility effort by asking yourself “who am I hoping to impress with this work?”

Whether or not your accessibility efforts go to use often comes down to targeting disabled attendees who require the accommodations as the audience of your accessibility performance. It doesn’t always feel good to disabled attendees when accessibility is used to virtue signal to broader audiences about the goodness or inclusivity of your event. The effort of working to reach disabled people, rather than simply make your event accessible, allows institutions to build trust with audiences who have historically been excluded from spaces that are now trying to welcome us. 

When composer Jay Alan Zimmerman became deaf, he got so frustrated about it he created an incredibly deaf musical. Then music visualizers with Google. And a musical robot orchestra at Spotify. In this insightful talk, Jay shares how he keeps transforming access into art and why you need to join the party.

Jay Alan Zimmerman, aka “Broadway’s Beethoven,” developed the Seeing Music visualizers with Google, assembled a musical robot orchestra at Spotify, and, as a 9/11 survivor, was recently featured in the History Channel’s documentary “I Was There.” He is best known for creating and starring in his INCREDIBLY DEAF MUSICAL seen Off-Broadway, his BRAIN. STORM. musical movie commissioned and produced by Prospect Theater Company, and his NAUGHTY & NICE HOLIDAY SONGBOOK available on Amazon, which played both Lincoln Center and 54 Below (with America’s Got Talent Runner-Up Mandy Harvey) and was developed through over a decade of annual concerts at Lincoln Center. Jay also designed and built the visual music installations WINDOW MUSIC at the NY Academy of Medicine and ART/SONG at Chashama Times Square, wrote the COMFORT PET play for a cast of diverse disabled actors for Fault Line Theater, and has a patent pending on hearing visualization. He and his work has been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Playbill, Broadway World, Broadway DOT Com, The New Yorker, Voice Of America, and WNYC/NPR/BBC Radio, and his projects have been seen Off-Broadway, in London’s West End, Canada, Europe, the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and the Paris Pompidou. He is a proud member of the Tony-honored BMI Musical Theater Workshop where he was recently honored as the 2022 songwriter winner of the Jerry Harrington Award for Outstanding Creative Achievement in Musical Theatre.